Edward's Rambling Blag

After a morning spent packing, receiving yet more gifts, and trying to avoid being booked into a ¥350-a-night hotel in Xining, I got a 24 hour sleeper train in the afternoon.

Each compartment had six bunks, in two stacks of three. I had a middle bunk which…was not designed for people my size. I couldn’t sit up, and could barely turn around (though it was partially my fault for sleeping with my rucksack). Getting in or out required extreme gymnastic contortions. Opposite each compartment were two folding seats and a tiny table near the window – these are, I assume, to be used by those non-miniature people in the upper bunks who want somewhere to sit during the day. In addition, in theory, the lower bunks are for ‘communal seating’ when people aren’t sleeping on them. Unfortunately there were many times when people from the lower bunks were sitting on the window seats…and I was too scared to go and sit on their beds just to spite them.

The rest of the day passed without much excitement; the scenery between Beijing and Xi’an isn’t terribly inspiring, so I spent the time reading the part of Einstein’s Relativity – The Special and General Theory that deals with trains, embankments and rays of light (pretty meta, I know). A kindly train guard helped me when I mysteriously got yet another nosebleed (I’ve had five since arriving in China – something to do with pollution? Or incredibly rough-textured tissues?).

The beds were surprisingly comfortable to sleep on, but I found it hard to get to sleep for several reasons:

• The lights stayed on (and people stayed up) for a really long time into the night
• Every time the train went over some points, or turned slightly, or even just repeatedly at random, there were several incredibly loud bangs – really really loud, like there was a cannon mounted underneath the carriage. Not much fun.
• Incredibly repetitive jingles coming from the radio being played over the PA system – these did end in the evening, but started up again with extreme gusto in the morning.

I did attempt to take some pictures from the train window the following day, when the landscape became rather attractive, though everyone looked at me really strangely whenever I did so.

Upon arrival at Xining (West) station, I had to fight my way through hordes of shifty-looking taxi drivers, though I eventually gave in and let one drive me to the city centre (for a rather steep ¥40 – the standard metered fare would be more like ¥20), where I found the rather wonderful Lete Youth Hostel. Perched on the 15th floor of a tower block, there are lovely views of much of the city – though this didn’t help at all with my map-reading the following day.

Having settled into a nice (if small) single room, and unpacked my main bag, I set off into the city at random (it was getting on for 4pm), with the vague hope of finding the Dongguan Great Mosque. However, I soon came upon a mountain with some temples up its side, so I decided to go on a hike to take a closer look.

The path carried on going, up and up, past a bunch of {Confucian|Taoist|Buddhist} temples, and further on up the mountainside. The views of the city and surrounding country were getting nicer the higher I went, so I kept on going.

Eventually I reached the top, to find the weird white tent-thing which you can see at the right of the third picture of the panorama above. I met a lost-looking Buddhist monk who asked me if I spoke Tibetan (I don’t), and then said he didn’t speak English (I was baffled too).

Hidden just over the rim of the mountain was what appeared to be more temples (and particularly attractive ones), though walking down that side it became more of a mystery.

The whole temple area was surrounded by a green fence engraved with Arabic (and hence Islamic) calligraphy. It looked unfortunately closed, though, so I couldn’t investigate any further.

Past the temples, and a café and car park, was a rather lovely little park, with lots of trees, ponds and pagodas – and lots of people milling around many of them Hui people in religious dress (or those little round hats, at least). There were also more good opportunities for views of the city.

I sat in the peace and quiet for a while, then went back up the mountain. The sun was about to set, so the light was such that the conditions were good for some more landscape photography.

I investigated the first lot of temples a little bit more on the way back down (the other side). There were certainly some Buddhist prayer flags (with Tibetan characters written on them).

On my way back to the youth hostel (which I managed to find!), I passed several groups of old (apparently mostly Hui) men, who were gathered on the pavement around games of what looked like Mahjong (and possibly a few others). Xining supposedly has 36 different nationalities, composed mostly of Han Chinese, Hui (Chinese Muslims, broadly speaking) and, quoth the guidebook, “rather lost-looking Tibetans” – Xining is the provincial capital of Qinghai province, and, despite being at the far eastern end of the province, is basically right on the edge of the Tibetan plateau (hence all the dramatic landscape). It has a population of 2.2 million, fairly small for a provincial capital. More on the city itself in tomorrow’s spiel, when I describe how totally lost I got. Back at the youth hostel I was lazy and ordered spaghetti bolognese for supper. I needed respite from all the weird stuff I’d been eating the past week!

People in China also get up nice and late on Sundays, it seems, so we had another brunch – noodly stuff, fried egg with normal (toasted) bread, and those fluffy white buns (which I don’t normally like, but are actually delicious when fried).

We set off to visit the extravaganza of grandeur and po-faced nationalism that is Tian’anmen Square, picking up Angel’s cousin along the way. Meanwhile, Angel’s father was very kindly buying a train ticket for me at the station.

Apparently not satisfied with the majestic buildings and monuments that line the square, not to mention the view-ruining mausoleum containing creepified-Mao-remains (which thankfully I was spared), there are two gigantic screens (actual LCDs, not projections, as far as I could make out) blasting out views of appropriately picturesque/cultural views of China, with accompanying rousing choral music. I couldn’t find any cracked paving stones; the government must have replaced them all by now. The grand gates at either end of the square are quite attractive, however. We exited through the one closest to the Forbidden City.

From that entry point there is a fairly long walk down an avenue lined with various tradespeople, beggars (Chinese beggars look particularly distraught and physically disabled, regrettably), trees (tautology alert) and even exercise grounds and parking space for the local security guards.

Later that afternoon we disappeared into the nearby Qianmen Dajie, in particular Dazhalan Lu, a surprisingly pretty well-preserved shopping district, complete with a working tram that runs the length of the street. We found a restaurant, supposedly just so we could sample Chinese ‘snacks’, but it rather ended up as yet another meal (at this point I don’t think I’m going to have to eat until I reach Kazakhstan) (update: indeed, I barely felt the slightest bit hungry after 24 hours on a train despite eating nothing except a single pot noodle). The first ‘snacks’ were some tasty fried fatty dough-balls covered in sugar, and some sort of weird bean mush (I preferred the former). This was accompanied by some nice ‘traditional’ refreshing fruit drink (my particular one was pear-flavoured).

The next selection was delicious lamb kebabs (presumably the Hui/Uyghur/whoever influence at work) and, in addition, one of the few things I’ve come across so far that I literally could not bring myself to eat. It was described as ‘soup with intestines and other organs’, and it smelt like…someone had left a rotting carcass under the table and forgotten about it for a week. The taste itself was worse. I picked out one tiny chunk with my chopsticks, forced myself to swallow it, almost threw up, and couldn’t get the taste out of the back of my throat for the next 12 hours. Angel’s cousin announced that he’d eaten this sort of thing every day for his entire childhood, and promptly finished mine off too. I was very impressed. Also horrified.

We wandered through the winding streets back towards Tian’anmen Square, to the rather fancy (and well-known) Lao She Teahouse, where we met Angel’s father once again. There I was taught the correct way to drink my tea, indicate I wanted it refilled (or not), etc. I was also introduced to the bewildering array of nibbles and sweetmeats of which, it turned out, I would be provided with a great big bag to take on the train.

That evening Angel was going back to university (she had 5 weeks of term left, out of 18), so in preparation we were dropped off outside the campus. While she dumped her bags in her room, the cousin and I sat around in a lecture hall, trying to get onto the schools’ WiFi — this proved impossible, as, despite being unencrypted, there was clearly some sort of device (MAC) based filtering going on (I suppose it wouldn’t really surprise me if everyone had to register all their wireless devices with the authorities). So we went off in search of a swanky coffee place (Beijing is full of these, unlike Jilin, which has two: one which we sat in endlessly, and one which Ella opened). We found one under Angel’s family’s other flat.

Thence we were picked up for a final evening meal, this time to experience Beijing (Mongolian) ‘hotpot’. A trough of constantly-boiling water is placed in the centre of the table, and raw food of your choice is dumped into it and left to cook for however long you want: the shredded ox stomach only requires five quick dunks into the water, whereas the thinly-sliced lamb is left in there for a few minutes (surprisingly, the stomach was completely fine for me). The overall effect is pretty much unlike all other ‘normal’ Chinese food: somewhat lacking in spices; instead, everything is dunked in your private bowl of tepid peanut-based sauce (to which can be added extra chilli, or other things). This meal also saw further development of my chopstick technique – mostly to aid the extraction of extremely slippery rice noodles from the boiling water (a combination of accurate stabbing, twisting, and slowly backing out is needed).

After the meal, I said my final fond goodbyes to Angel (and then her cousin), and returned home with her parents. (Note: It turns out I had in fact met her when I was 6 – there is photographic evidence – but neither of us remembered this at all!).

Luckily Chinese people get up nice and late at weekends. We had a sort of brunch at about 11, and I received some much-needed help planning the next leg of my trip from Angel and her parents. I had drawn up a shortlist of places to visit the previous day on the train, and we thought up a suitable itinerary: Beijing→Xining→Jiayuguan→Dunhuang→Ürümqi→Kazakhstan! (at the time of writing I am in Xining).

I managed to get some cash out of an ATM at the second Bank of China branch we tried, and then we set off for Beihai park, the main imperial park (and lake) at the centre of Beijing. The traffic in Beijing is more civilised than Jilin, but also much, much more congested. Angel’s parents’ flat is only on the second (out of 7) ring road, but it still took about an hour to get to the fairly central Beihai. The pollution is noticeable, at least at first – the back of my throat felt quite dry, and I seemed to get nosebleeds much more often(!) – though this was mitigated by the presence of lots of trees everywhere (unlike Jilin).

Most of the people at Beihai were Chinese tourists – it’s not quite so big a draw as, say, the Forbidden City (which it adjoins). The central attraction is a large island rising out of a massive lake (artificial, supposedly on the orders of Kublai Khan), on top of which is an impressive white ‘dagoba’ (not a pagoda) which dates from the mid-17th century, but which gets destroyed by an earthquake every one or two centuries.

The whole hill is covered in sundry religious buildings.

Next to the lake, down a bit of a side-channel to the north, is a traditional hutong district, with lots of sidestreets full of little shops and resturants. We stopped for supper at a rather fancy restaurant, then carried on past the roasted scorpions, clubs, outdoor KTV etc.

This little part of the lake is lined with attractive alabaster fences, and there is a famous white bridge, and nearby bell and drum towers. We also found a space where people were playing the traditional kicking-an-oversized-shuttlecock-into-the-air-repeatedly game, and bought one such shuttlecock so we could join in – Angel’s mother is particularly good at it, and I am informed that it’s a popular way for the elderly to exercise.

The train left at 10am – but incredibly I managed to get up at about 8, so had plenty of time to attempt to pack but probably in fact manage to leave lots of things there. We went to the neighbouring market to buy provisions for my trip:

• A tasty wrap-like thing
• Some sort of thick, folded-over eggy bread
• Lots and lots of individually-wrapped sweets that were basically like halva, but in slightly different flavours
• Two suspiciously-unwashed cucumbers (which Ella assured me were fine) (more on that later) (she was clearly trying to poison me)
• Another confused pear
• A bag of ‘sweet garlic’ fruits as a present for my Beijing hosts (the other present being an ‘English’ tea-towel that was in fact made in (Northern) Ireland)

Jilin train station is all imposing and Communist, which is great fun. I dropped my ticket in the middle of it, but this was fortunately spotted by a passer-by.

As soon as I got on the train, it was noticeable that people stopped staring at me the funny Westerner. And I found myself sitting next to an extremely attractive man in a green shirt; or at least I assume so, as Ella had previously pointed him out in the queue, as is her wont. I managed not to say a single word to him throughout the entire 8 hour journey, however (I’m not always in a talk-to-random-strangers mood). Actually I did spend a good part of the journey flicking through the part of the guidebook concerned with northwestern China, making a shortlist of places to go (cut down to three major sights later on).

Random notes upon leaving Jilin:

• The city in general looks pretty Western. There’s the occasional building with curious pagoda-esque features, but no more often than a building with e.g. a classical façade in England.
• At night time it’s another story, as the whole place comes alive with garish lights and colours; in particular the KTVs (Karaoke bars), which are…ridiculous.
• Everyone spits everywhere, all the time, even on buses/each other’s feet (not really). The person who spits the most is Ella – she thinks it makes her fit in with the locals. I think it makes her disgusting. I’m right.
• Everyone stares at the funny white foreigners, everywhere, all the time, even really blatantly e.g. walking around you/peering out the window as they drive past; but they generally think you’re Russian (the closest countries to Jilin are North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, in that order. In particular, the nearby Chinese city of Harbin apparently has a very Russian character).
• I still haven’t got the hang of the squatting toilets, they’re really impossible.
• All the pop music on the radio in Jilin is apparently in German, whereas in Beijing it’s all in French. Maybe.
• Eating slimy rice noodles with chopsticks takes years of training.
• The Jilin accent (i.e. the accent of the ‘Dongbei’ area) is quite funny/provincial, e.g. saying “Shaaaaaah” instead of “Shuh-muh” (“What?”).
• In particular, the Mandarin Chinese equivalent of “ummmm” or “errrr” is “niggah niggah niggah niggah”; and, especially in Jilin, that sounds very similar to…a certain unfortunate obscenity in English.
• Even in the relatively obscure (tier B) city of Jilin, the announcements on buses are also in English. Though that had to be pointed out to me explicitly, as I wouldn’t have understood a word of it otherwise.

The train ride to Beijing was only moderately scenic (no photos: my aged camera can’t really handle great velocities, especially given that I was on a high-speed train). The landscape starts off with wide open green fields, punctuated by the occasional gigantic mine (with accompanying gigantic slag heap), with dark green mountains rising up in the medium distance. There are sometimes gigantic motorways and bridges, some of them half built. There are frequent little subways under the track, even out in the remote countryside. Towns in the country consist either of clusters of one-storey brick hovels, or cranes next to half-built tower blocks, or both at once.

Gradually the fields and mines give way to factories belching smoke and trees, and the mountains recede into the distance (actually mostly into a bluish haze of smog), and then the countryside turns into factory upon factory on the outskirts of Beijing, and then tower blocks which go on and on and on. When we were still quite far from the station the train slowed to a crawl, and stayed there for the next 25 minutes until we arrived, presumably due to rail congestion.

Beijing (east) station is swish and modern, with all announcements and signs in actually comprehensible English. I eventually found and introduced myself to Angel’s parents, who bundled me into their car and fed me pastries (I sense a pattern here). Angel’s mother speaks reasonably good English (about as good as Ella’s Chinese), especially impressive since she hasn’t studied it for ~25 years (she is, however, extremely well-travelled). Though she seems to find it easier to say things than to understand my replies (perhaps I wasn’t putting on enough of an American accent). She could also probably pass for a 30 year old, despite being at least 50. Angel’s father knows only a few words of English (about as many as I have Chinese), but was also very friendly.

We drove past Tian’anmen Square, and arrived at their flat, which is just off Ring Road № 2 (i.e. pretty fancy). After a quick shower, it was off to a nearby restaurant where I was served the most amazing Beijing duck imaginable, along with a selection of weird and wonderful dishes, including: some sort of crispified durian, with a creamy centre – actually delicious, unlike my previous unfortunate durian experience; and a jellyfish-based salad, which was surprisingly tasty. They spent a good 3 or 4 tries attempting to get me to undertake the correct sequence of moves and folds to produce the perfect Beijing duck pancake thing. Towards the end of the meal a cousin of Angel’s turned up with her boyfriend, and they presented me with some interesting gifts (to be revealed at a later date). The boyfriend spoke good English, and came and chatted to me for a bit; he’s a chef from elsewhere in China, but he doesn’t cook any Chinese food: instead, he works with three Indian men, and they produce both Western and Indian food. His phone is full of pictures of his favourite English celebrity chefs: Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, and lots that I hadn’t heard of!

Back at the flat, we waited around chatting and drinking tea until Angel (20, but 21 in Chinese years, I think) finally arrived from her university. I gave them the fruit (turns out it was an appropriate gift after all, thank you Ella!) and the tea towel. Then I went to bed.

Oh and in the night I woke up and threw up lots and lots (into the toilet, luckily), which I’m definitely blaming on something Ella got me at the market in Jilin in the morning. I was fine in the morning though.

This was (unfortunately) my last full day with Ella, as the train I had hoped to get was all booked up – so I had to et (with Ella’s help) a high-speed train to Beijing, taking 8 hours, and leaving the following morning. Then it was off shopping, or at least an attempt at shopping. We didn’t find any shirts or jumpers that both fit me and were vaguely acceptable fashion-wise (Ella being the ultimate arbiter here); though we did find a Chinese SIM card for use in my phone. I saved a bit of money by avoiding the choice of a particularly ‘lucky’ number (i.e. one lacking fours and possessing repeated numbers).

We found a place selling spicy noodle soup, and I learnt how to order peanut milk, and then it was off to the school to help out in one of Ella’s wonderful language lessons. This class was composed of 5 lively 10 year olds, along with a tired-looking mother sitting towards the back (I was sitting right at the back, doing some maths, trying not to distract Ella). After the break the time came for me to read out my prepared statement, denouncing my crimes against the party…umm, I mean, describing what it had been like for me at school. Except every one of the statements was mostly untrue (“It was funny, because my dad was the teacher.”…”at high school I sat in the cafeteria with my friends”). I deliberately avoided the American accent which Ella claims is necessary for the children to understand her. Though her own put-on accent seems to reflect more how Chinese people speak English, rather than real Americans, pirates, farmers from the West country etc. (“arrrr I be a pirrate/farrrrmerrr”).

Ella was fairly casual in her approach to discipline, which was understandable – these children had been at school already for about 10 hours, and were expected to survive another 2 hours of English, with only a 10 minute break in the middle.

Then we found a slightly up-market restaurant with weird oily food and yet more peanut milk. And I still haven’t got the hang of squatting toilets, even the fancy ones which you can flush by pulling a chain. We celebrated my last night by going and sitting around with Benji (he lives directly above Ella), and watching yet more episodes of Community.

Played poker for the first time last night! I won a single round — the last but one before I had to go all in and lost completely. Ella fared significantly better, being only about the fourth last player to go out (and winning plenty of rounds along the way, some rather dramatically). We and the USicans passed the time slagging off each others’ accents, culture and general record of imperialist tendencies.

We started off this day somewhat lazily (Ella was still bit ill, and we lay around watching episodes of Community – the cause of which I’ve converted her to), but did manage to make our way to a fruit shop where we bought some confused pears and a durian (more on that below) as a snack for later in the day; and thence to a nearby noodle restaurant for lunch. We were given a gigantic pot of noodly salty liquid, in which were floating chunks of fish, tofu, various Chinese vegetables and slices of what appeared to be spam. We had a smaller bowl each, and chopsticks and a small spoon – so serving noodles into your own bowl involved slopping a pile of them over the side of the pot, then dragging them down into your bowl into a big sloppy mess.

Then we were off to Beishan, the larger of the two mountains of Jilin, and its number one tourist spot – what with the picturesque bridge, boats, temples, imposing patriotic war memorial etc. The way up the mountain had various sights – some more traditional music and singers (who rather seemed to be enjoying themselves; I suspect that the traditional style of singing sounds weird to Western ears because they do sing the correct ‘tones’ for the language, and this tends to throw the tuning of the real melody off a little here and there), lots of enthusiastic fortune-tellers, and a curiously pointless game of throwing money at a pool containing giant brass statues of babies from stones marked ‘wealth’, ‘career’, ‘relationship’ etc. Neither Ella nor I succeeded in getting a stone into the central depression which would ensure good luck in the appropriate field), though we did only try from the ‘children’ stone.

The temple complex at the top was pretty extensive, and we discovered it had in fact been built in the 1920s, so not quite as garish and modern as we had at first suspected. The amount of incense was extreme, as were the number of stalls selling knick-knacks (ranging from complete tat – bright pink cowboy hats – to impressive craftsmanship – engraving characters on a single grain of rice.

After much huffing and straining, we found a big rock on which to perch, to eat our afore-purchased fruit; however, the durian was foul, so we attempted, and failed, to take the taste away with the confused pears. After that, we took a long stroll down the mountain, past the imposing PLA Korean war memorial and associated gigantic burial complex (the buildings apparently completed last year), and through the noticeably impoverished Muslim (Uyghur) district, with its mosque with two tall minarets, and various plaques of Arabic lettering outside its schools and houses. Plus a stall selling real motorbikes, not just scooters. Then a taxi ride home, where some washing was done and some preparation for the night out.

In the evening we (7 of us) took off for a restaurant which promised a lamb’s leg barbecue; however the first few places we tried weren’t up to scratch for one reason or another, and we eventually settled on one some distance away. There we were presented with a table with a great big rectangular hole cut in its middle, into which was placed a tray of extremely hot coals, and a huge half-cooked leg of lamb on a spit above it. The whole thing was too hot to get your face closer than about 50cm, so the hacking and sawing was carried out with a little knife and fork mounted on extremely long metal poles (a pair of utensils each). We made our way through this monstrosity, along with the side dishes – tendon (which was fine while I still thought it was squid, and not so much afterwards), tofu, rice and great big cloves of fried garlic, still in its tough outer skin (interesting stuff). The idea was that you gradually cut the layers of lamb off to eat as they were cooked by the coals underneath, rotating the whole thing regularly to get to a freshly cooked side. Each little piece of meat (which often required further cooking on the end of the metal skewer) was then rolled in the collection of seeds/spices on your plate, before eating. When we’d finished with the lamb, Benji (Ella’s teaching supervisor) got out the bag of marshmallows that I’d specially purchased the previous Saturday at the sweet stall in Cambridge market, and we proceeded to roast and eat them bonfire-style (and had to carefully explain to the Americans the superiority of these things over whatever it is that they call “s[']mores”).

The next item in the evening’s entertainment was one of the local KTV (“Karaoke…Tele…vision?”) establishments, where three solid hours of predictable boring loud pop music ensued. Everyone else enjoyed it though. Ella and I failed to get through a whole ‘song’ as Daleks. Someone attempted a rickroll, but the video played was a different recording which didn’t even contain Rick Astley(!)

Tomorrow I think I’m being expected to be involved in some of Ella’s teaching…it appears I’m to be the class’s ‘listening exercise’, whatever that means.

After a ride from the aiport with Ella in the taxi of a friendly taxi driver, I settled down for a comfortable night (she lent me her bed, despite my protests, and is sleeping on the sofa). The flat is impressively tidy, and is decorated with a selection of curious film postsers left by the previous occupant. It’s also the only place for miles around (apparently) with a Western-style toilet.

In the morning (having been dragged out of bed) we went on a quick scavenge of the local food market, for some breakfast things – warm soy milk (which I have to admit I don’t find terribly appetising), then a long walk between rows and rows of stalls selling everything from garishly coloured birthday cakes to every internal organ you’d it was possible to extract and eat and then more – to a place selling triple-helix dough things (and very tasty they were too). The favourite fruit, apart from watermelons, appears to be rather confused-looking (and tasting) ‘apple pears’. They’re the size and shape of apples, but have mottled skin and soft flesh like pears, and taste about halfway between the two.

Aside: I managed to set up a super-duper encrypted SSH tunnel from Ella’s cranky old desktop computer in the corner of her room, thus putting my mind at rest about communications eavesdropping (and enabling this exciting blog to be updated).

Ella then took me to the hairdresser next door to get my hair cut (it’s been getting horribly long, but I put off getting it cut until I went abroad). For some reason I trusted Ella to give directions to the kind old lady (who when we got there was occupied putting lots of small plastic tubes into the hair of another old lady, presumably for curly-hair-related reasons). So I’ve ended up with a haircut which is, in her words, “like a WWII airman”. Which may or may not be a good thing. The old lady attempted to describe some sort of remedy for dandruff, but we didn’t understand the identity of the mysterious key ingredient. But at least she described both me and Ella as ‘beautiful’ (normally only she gets these compliments; being extremely vain, I’m very jealous).

We found a taxi and whizzed off across the surprisingly large river that runs through the middle of Jilin to the other side of the city, where we found a delicious lunch down a back street opposite the grandiose Hall of Petrochemicals (headquarters of some company/industrial thing). This was a slightly poorer neighbourhood, so the number of curious stares in our general direction was marginally increased (I don’t blame them; no Westerners come to Jilin, and barely any native Chinese tourists, except in Winter for skiing and to see the ‘ice trees’). There we had an interesting soup-like substance, composed of many chunks of potato-derived gluten in a rather attractive spicy (but watery) sauce and a few vegetables (we also ordered some chow mein). I did quite like the weird jelly stuff, though I wouldn’t want to eat it every day.

We set off for the park surrounding one of the two local mountains (the ‘Dragon Lake’ mountain), and eventually found a way in (the main entrance being blocked off by a large construction project, apparently to expand the existing leisure area/Buddhist temple complex). In the woods on the side of the mountain (it was more of a hill) we found a rather nice traditional music ensemble practising – this appealed to my (not-so-)inner music snob, as it was less awful and Western-pop-derived than the music we generally heard. Other sights included a gaggle of soldiers on a break, and quite a few adorable stripey squirrels scurrying around (and an interestingly-coloured bird that I failed to get a picture of).

Eventually we got to the local collection of temples; though we think these are only about 30-40 years old. One was staffed by a couple of monks, who kindly gave us some incense to plant in a tray, then demonstrated the appropriate number of bows (3) to give in front of the statues (which we did), before motioning towards the donation box in the corner. Among the other buildings there were a couple of towers with a giant bell and drum, and some large warrior statues.

We continued up to the top of the mountain, on the way dodging some tractors and finding the entrance to a little cave (possibly the home of the eponymous dragon). The top offered reasonably good views of the couple of valleys that Jilin sits in (hopefully reflected in our photos). Back down in the city we took a bus back into the centre; we went on a walk; we passed miles and miles of garishly-coloured mopeds for sale, spotted a couple of highly suspicious ‘Authorised Reseller’ Apple stores, then arrived at a trendy coffee-selling café with delicious green tea biscuits), and Ella left me to go off and do here day’s worth (~1.5 hours) of teaching.

This evening we’ll be joining the circle of expats (and other Westernised fellows) who seem to be centred on the house of a Cantonese businessman named Edmund. Apparently we’ll be playing poker. Sounds fun.

Postscript: I’m currently sitting in the aforementioned trendy café listening to a fairly faithful reproduction of Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, with the merely the following changes:

• the main themes are played on a solo guitar (acoustic)
• the tutti sections are accompanied by a drum-kit

So not much difference really.